Turing Award winner Leslie Valiant has cautioned that AI-powered large language models (LLMs), while appearing intelligent, are a far cry from possessing human-like thinking capabilities.
Valiant, a celebrated British computer scientist, earned the Association for Computing Machinery's 2010 A.M. Turing Award for his work that helped lay the foundation for machine learning.
In an interview with China Media Group (CMG), Valiant acknowledged that breakthroughs in AI have produced fascinating results, but warned that observers should be objective in their analysis of what the technology is capable of.
"I think the big difference of these large language models is the fact that they can produce very smooth language in English or Chinese. Humans find it stunning. Intuitively, without thinking, you think anything which can produce such smooth sentences must be human. But, of course, that's not true," said the computer scientist.
Despite some impressive achievements made by today's LLMs, Valiant pointed to key limitations when compared to human thinking and knowledge.
"Whether these things pass the Turing test isn't so clear. The Turing test would be, like you interviewing a machine and really trying to find out whether it's a machine or not. And you're allowed to ask very careful questions. So, I suspect that you could figure out whether it's a machine or a human," he said. "Generally, I think my view of these large language models is that, for things which I have little expertise, like doing some home repairs, so I go to a large language model because it knows much more than I do. But in anything where you have some expertise, it's not as accurate. I mean, in passing tests, it's very hard to judge because many questions in many tests are all standardized, repeated on the web a million times. So, it's just doing a search. So, for any story like that, I believe, one doesn't have to take that seriously," Valiant added.
Intelligence of LLMs should not be overstated: Turing Award laureate
China-Southeast Asia cooperation has been a key topic at the ongoing Financial Street Forum in Beijing, with attendees expressing positive attitudes toward further development.
The Annual Conference of the Financial Street Forum 2024, running until Sunday, is co-hosted by the Beijing government, the People's Bank of China, the National Financial Regulatory Administration, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Xinhua News Agency, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
At the parallel forum 'China-Southeast Asia Cross-border Investment and Industrial Cooperation for High-quality Development', delegates from government units, industry associations and enterprises shared their views on the importance of economic cooperation between China and Southeast Asian nations, with some keynote speakers highlighting new energy vehicles as a key investment area.
"Southeast Asia has become a region with the most concentrated overseas investment by Chinese automobile companies, particularly in new energy vehicles (NEVs). In 2023, over 60 percent of NEVs sold in Southeast Asia were Chinese brands. The business community has been an active participant and promoter of the high-quality development of China-Southeast Asia economic and trade cooperation," said Ren Hongbin, chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
"The collaboration between Indonesia and China in the area of EV ecosystem, electric vehicle ecosystem, in the past ten years has been phenomenal. Through this collaboration, the Chinese investor, Chinese corporation come to Indonesia, develop the sector, working together with the local cooperation with the governments, building something from almost scratch into something really big," said Stefanus ade hadiwidjaja, CEO of Indonesia Investment Authority.
China has been the largest trading partner of ASEAN for 15 consecutive years, and for the past four years, the two have mutually been each other's largest trading partners. As of the end of July, mutual investments had exceeded 400 billion U.S. dollars.
China-Southeast Asia cooperation on NEVs takes center stage at Financial Street Forum 2024
China-Southeast Asia cooperation on NEVs takes center stage at 2024 Financial Street Forum
